'Just a guy who tells a story'

21 September 2009

'I was already writing The Lost Symbol when I started to realize The Da Vinci Code would be big. The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who's had success is that I temporarily became very self-aware. Instead of writing and saying, 'This is what the character does,' you say, 'Wait, millions of people are going to read this.' It's sort of like a tennis player who thinks too hard about a stroke--you're temporarily crippled. Then the furore died down, and I realized that none of it had any relevance to what I was doing. I'm just a guy who tells a story.'